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His artwork, probably the most easily recognized of all SF and F artists, favored redheads, flames, and vivid colors. He called himself an illustrator, yet spent his entire professional life in contact with pros and fans: A remarkably courteous man, who will be missed. The vast span of his career can be seen at Frank Kelly Freas' Website.

Cartoonist Will Eisner, creator of The Spirit, and famous for his skillful drawing. To see more about him, his art, and tributes to him, visit Will Eisner's Website. A versatile worker, he wandered far afield, with projects as unusual as editing and illustrating an edition of Robert's Rules of Order .

With "Puss-cat Mew" by E. H. Knatchbull-Hugessen we come to a story that we know Tolkien read, loved, and continued to approve of even as an adult. It almost classically simple. A young man, Joe Brown, sets out on a journey, comes to a dangerous wood, and battles Ogres and Dwarfs with the aid of Fairies—and of Puss-cat Mew.

It begins, "Every child knows the sweet nursery rhyme of 'Puss-cat Mew,'—'Puss-cat Mew jumped over a coal/In her best petticoat burnt a great hole;/Puss-cat Mew shan't have any milk/Till her best petticoat's mended with silk.'"

Not being certain I had heard this, and well aware that Sam's "traditional" songs in Lord of the the Rings come right out of Sam's head, I went in search if the nursery rhyme. It is indeed credited to Mother Goose by Carl Van Vechten, in The Tiger in the House. "An old Mother Goose rhyme has it that," and here he give the rhyme. He continues, "With this verse for his inspiration E. H. Knatchbull-Hugessen composed a fairy story, “Puss-Cat Mew,” which is a mixture of familiar folklore elements: the ogres are the giants of Jack and the Beanstalk and Joe Brown, the miller’s son who is befriended in the magic forest by a tortoise-shell cat, who, of course, at the proper moment becomes a beautiful and marriageable young lady and the daughter of no less a personage than the Queen of the Fairies, is easily recognizable. Still when I recently reread the story I again felt its charm and its thrill and the horrible man-eating ogres still inspired terror." This was written in 1922, so apparently the rhyme and story were both well known.

SFWA President, Robin Wayne Bailey, said, "Born in 1928 in Kansas City, Missouri, William sold his first fiction in 1954. His work has included a broad range of material, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, westerns and mysteries. He's authored over 150 stories and 75 books, including 13 novels. Among the best-known of his novels is Logan's Run, co-authored with George Clayton Johnson, and later on his own, Logan's World and Logan's Search. His work has earned praise from such writers as Stephen King, Ray Bradbury and Joe R. Landsdale."

Many people are familiar with his name from the 1976 movie, Logan's Run, which is not precisely the same as the book.
To be blunt, it is quite different. A remake, with a story closer to that of the book is schedule for release in 2006. Nolan's two sequels take the story into other, entirely unfamiliar and much darker territory. There was also a brief television series and a Marvel Comic strip.

However, Nolan wrote many other books, and Ships in the Night, a short story collection, provides a convenient sampler of his works, both in and out of genre.

SFWA President, Robin Wayne Bailey, said, in part, "The Board of Directors, in consultation with participating past presidents, is also pleased to announce the recipient of the next Grand Master Award—Harlan Ellison. Harlan really needs no introduction to any of you. He's truly a legend in our community. Since his first sale, "Glowworm," to Infinity Science Fiction in 1956, Harlan Ellison has shaped and sometimes re-shaped modern science fiction. As a writer and as an anthologist, his infuence, though sometimes controversial, has been vast. He's won a remarkable eight and a half Hugo Awards, plus three Nebula Awards, many script-writing awards for his television work, two Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, two World Fantasy Awards, including their Lifetime Achievement Award, and five Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writers Association, including their Lifetime Achievement Award...."

Born May 27, 1934, Ellison's career has always been at least tangetial to the genre, and often at its heart. He prefers to be considered as associated with various literary movements, despite his work on Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, and Babylon Five, and numerous awards in the genre, which put a lock on him as far as most fans are concerned.

Well known for his stubborn defense of his work and his copyrights, he is also reputed to have said that he does no writing he cannot sell. Driven to writing a dunning letter to collect an overdue payment, he turned it into an article which he then sold to a writers' magazine. He is suspected of having a sense of humor.

Discworld being at once familiar and unusual in so many other respects, it should come as no surprise that its art, too, partakes of both qualities. Although the not Mona Lisa on the cover does tend to give one pause, raising questions like, Where have I seen that face before, and then, Why do we care about the Mona Lisa anyway?

The disconcertingly appropriate cover aside, Art of Discworld is full of interesting bits of information, like why Rincewind, who plays a central role in the first two books, is reduced to a bit player thereafter; why sunlight is bad for trolls; and why death, excuse me, Death, has a rather pleasant mansion with a major wizard for batman.

Paul Kidby is the artist, and he has worked with Terry Pratchett almost since the series began. It not very often that Prachett comments that he visualizes a character as somewhat different than Kidby's version. Kidby's rendition of Discworld, resting on the backs of four immense African elephants, which stand on the back of an even more immense Green Turtle that, cratered by debris, swims through space, now hangs on Prachett's wall.

The turtle, Great A'Tuin, looks rather skeptical about it all, but then she has an agenda of her own.

The November issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction has an article by Brian Attebery comparing George MacDonald with C. S. Lewis, which—available through their website for four dollars—contrasts the creative MacDonald with the more doctrinaire Lewis when they used Christianity in their writing. It makes a case that MacDonald is, of the two, the harder for modern audiences to read not only because he is writing in an older, less-familiar tradition, but also because his symbolism is complex and not necessary allegorical nor superficially consistent.

MacDonald's nonfiction still speaks to people and is in print, as is the remembrances, From a Northern Window, by his son—retroactively perhaps unfortunately named—Ronald MacDonald.

C. S. Lewis wrote about MacDonald, senior, who he cited as an influence on his own work, although Lewis' book about MacDonald sets him up as a straw man, and Lewis wins the debate only because he is writing the script for both sides. MacDonald, despite the distance in time, still speaks very well for himself. His Diary of an Old Soul, a series of devotions intended to be read day by day, is an easy way to step into his ministerial work.

It is, however, his fiction that has the greater effect in keeping MacDonald's name and work alive. He valued a dream-like feel and this appears in all his tales, some quite acute in their psychology. This is partcularly apparent in his two most famous novels for adults, Lilith and Phantastes, in which one may climb up to reach someplace that is down, go in to reach someplace larger than the exterior, and in which the charcters struggle to make sense of cryptic and contradictory information.

On Discworld, there is an extra color, the one that accompanies or is generated by magic potential. Like purple-green greasy lighting it flickers around spell books, swords of power, and snaps through the air when things are afoot. It is called octarine.

If you are a wizard named Rincewind, it is generally a bad sign when the color of magic shows up, since you have room for only one spell in your mind, a master spell, one of the eight great spells, one you aquired by an unfortunate school-boy prank and that can only be used once. You have no idea what it does. Not for you any of the simple magics that make a wizard's life comfortable and respected. No, you must struggle along, aided by your wits and a gift for languages.

Worse, you are an apppointed escort of the First Tourist, Twoflowers, a man who knows no fear in the pursuit of things beyond his formerly mudane life. Worse still, after a cordial reception and your appointment, a second message has told the Patrician of Rincewind's beloved, noisome city of Ankh-Morpork that it would be a nice thing if Twoflowers happened to have a fatal adventure.

And Death, who speaks IN CAPITAL LETTERS, drops into the story evey so often, for it is he, and he alone, who must claim a wizard's soul...

It probably says something for my ability to ignore things I intend to ignore that Prachett has thirty novels in his Discworld series, novels reviewers have clucked and purred over, and I have just finished one.

Entirely in the spirit of his enterprise, I inadvertantly picked the second in the series for my first. This turned out to be a good thing, since by the second book, The Light Fantastic, Prachett has his characters well-established, and his broad sense of humor reined in. Some of the time.

My favorite character is the Luggage. Made of "sapient pearwood" it combines all the better features of dog of war, the perfect maid, and a no credit limit bank account. Which should make getting out of dangerous situations easy, if it were not that our hero, Rincewind the not-quite-wizard, has a sort of negative talent.

And then there's Twoflowers, Discworld's first tourist, who...

But let me begin at the beginning of it all, with a giant turtle swimming through space, with four elephants upon its back, and upon their backs Discworld, a flat world, a world with eight seasons, and directions like hubward and spinward. A world out of legend, with annoyingly large quanties of magic, a world that first was detailed in The Color of Magic.